At the heart of Rios’s upbeat celebration of giving is simple and practical advice: We must take care of each other. 

Critical to Rios’s work is his Catholic faith and his lifelong love of the classroom; the poem’s speaker affects a spiritual and teacherly tone, moving from easy-to-understand symbols drawn from the real world—rivers, old books, colors, and house nails—to more abstract and complex epigrams that illuminate the paradoxical nature of giving, as summed up by the title: The more we give, the more we have. 

The poem’s two-line epigraph offers an image of nature: rivers coming together. In using the image of a small river joining another and thus eventually adding its strength to a mighty network, the metaphor argues that coming together for mutual aid is an innate part of nature: The dynamic of giving is simply how it operates, rejecting isolation and separation as insufficient. Any ecosystem is an example of giving as a strategy for empowerment. 

Rios sets the epigraph apart rather than having it serve as the poem’s opening couplet. This both foreshadows and contrasts with the closing one-line stanza. Both epigraph and the last line seem isolated from the poem. However, although the epigraph is typographically set apart—italicized, left-justified, and adrift in white space—in keeping with the poem’s message of coming together, its end lines will be fused together with enjambment: Despite being its own stanza, the last line actually completes the thought from the previous line, bridging that space. If we start the poem apart, we will end the poem together. 

The first three stanzas, each a couplet, explicate the epigraph’s symbol of the rivers. The couplets use anaphora (repeating “we give” and “we have”) to create the call-and-response feel of religious ceremony. Immediately embracing the reader through the first-person plural “we,” these stanzas include their audience in the network of generosity they describe. In using the first-person plural, Rios crosses the poet-reader boundary; later the poem will turn even more intimate, using “you” and “I” to directly address the reader. The rhetorical device confirms that “we”—that is “you and I”—are in this together; whatever our background, “we” make up the human community. 

The universal inclusivity of the “we” is repeated in the all-encompassing allowance that giving happens either to continue a cycle—“someone gave to us” (Line 1)—or, paradoxically, to break a cycle—we give “because nobody gave to us” (Line 2). The possibilities of giving are multifarious and not always positive: Although often “We have been better” after being charitable (Line 5), the poem acknowledges that the ramifications of generosity can be harmful, either because they remind us of missed opportunities when “giving could have changed us” but didn’t (Line 4), or when “We have been wounded by it” (Line 6).

Stanza 4 personifies the idea of giving as a figure comprising multitudes, a person with “many faces” (Line 7). The poem uses that image to point out that giving has neither maximal nor minimal limits. Giving can be “loud” (Line 7)—an adjective that suggests public works, social activism, community uplift, or other large-scale project. It can also be “quiet” (Line 7), consisting of smaller acts of kindness for a closer circle of family or friends.

No matter its size, giving is tremendously valuable in ways that defy the actual action taken. In keeping with the aphorism that it’s the thought that counts, the poem contrasts the outsized effects of even the tiniest measures of caring for others: These efforts are “Big, though small” (Line 8). Likewise, the value of giving can be analogized to the physical world: Being the recipient of meaningful generosity is like finding a “diamond in wood-nails” (Line 8)—a rare and precious material in a heap of ordinary things. 

Stanza 5 shifts to the image of a beloved book, its pages worn and its plot long-memorized and possibly even hokey. Despite its well-trod subject matter, “we read this book, anyway, over and again” (Line 10), continuing to be inspired by its message of caring about others. The image, however, is double-edged. Yes, we never tire of stories that encourage us to practice kindness. But, on the other hand, it might be necessary to keep reading about giving because we have failed to act on what we’ve learned. Nevertheless, the poem is a call to action, not a scolding for past mistakes. 

Stanza 6 breaks down the communal “we” into the reciprocal relationship of “you” and “I,” reaching out a hand to the reader to make a personal connection. By insisting that giving, however big or small, always involves the intimate transaction of going “hand to hand” (Line 11), the speaker invites the reader to imagine giving as a tactile, physical process—not the abstraction of philanthropy at a distance. The poem also insists that giving is cyclical and reciprocal, forging a relationship of equals where generosity transfers from “Mine to yours, yours to mine” (Line 12)—a dynamic that is directly opposed to the typical conception of charity as a one-way movement from the privileged to those worse off.

The poem’s final image is drawn from the childhood discovery of creating new colors by mixing paints: “You gave me blue and I gave you yellow” (Line 13), and together “we are simple green” (Line 14). The verbs are key in these lines. By first switching into the past tense, the poem assumes that the kind of mutual aid it is describing has already happened: Without knowing it, you have already brought the blue that is the best complement to my yellow. The next line conflates and internalizes the colors that have been mixed—your blue and my yellow don’t simply make green, but instead transform us so that we “are” green together. This imagery plays into Rios’s interest in transborder themes, suggesting the interplay of culture and heritage in creating something new and transformative.

The poem closes with a three-line insight that leaps the boundary of the couplet form. Only together, the poem closes, can we build something greater than what we have if we stay apart.